Jeff Varasano, of Patsy's Reverse-Engineer Fame, Profiled in the 'New York Times'

How cool is this? In September 2006, Jeff Varasano's Pizza Page blew up like mad when Boing Boing and all the other biggies linked to it. You see, Varasano announced on his page that he was finally satisfied with his at-home Patsy's clone. Well, the New York Times finally noticed—took 'em two years—and runs a great profile on Jeff. It's full of charming anecdotes about his travails while cooking with an oven modified to bake pizza during the self-clean cycle:

In the steel floor of the lower oven, there is a jagged, dime-size hole, made when an errant piece of superheated topping melted through. One window pane in that oven’s door is shattered, destroyed after a drop of sauce fell onto it at high heat. There is a long list of wrecked equipment — two more oven windows, three mixers and food processors, one internal fan. The oven has been shorting fuses lately. It’s getting harder, Mr. Varasano said, to make up stories for the oven repair guys.

The story also mentions that Varasano is thinking of opening his own pizzeria in Atlanta, where he now lives, this fall.

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About the Author

Adam Kuban is the founder of Slice, where he has been writing about pizza since October 10, 2003. He also founded A Hamburger Today, but burgers don't really do much for him these days. If you find Adam anywhere on SE these days, it's primarily in Talk and in the comments of Slice. He has taken an extended hiatus from his weekly pizza reviews and monthly Home Slice feature while he explores the actual work of pizza-making at Paulie Gee's in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.